Definition of photo-mosaic

A photo-mosaic is an image that is stiched together by photographs all taken from different viewpoints. This differs from the panorama where all images are taken from one single viewpoint but with different angles.

The typical case of a photo-mosaic is the linear panorama, where one large subject like a wall, is photographed by taking photos of the wall, each covering a proportion of the wall, and moving the camera parallell to the wall with each shot.

The classical way to stich these kinds of mosaics was to lay the prints out on a light-table and glue them together. Now with the mosaic-mode in the panotools lens model, it is possible to use the software estimate the camera position including angles, lens distorsion etc. and to reproject and stich the images to a photo-mosaic.

Understanding the mosaic-lens model

The panotools lens model has been expanded with addition of three new parameters that describe the camera position in cartesian coordinates, TrX, TrY, and TrZ

The yaw, pitch and roll angles now apply on the camera around the camera's TrX, TrY and TrZ position in space